Re: And after you have splashed out so much cash..

I'm one of those people, for my home data storage.

Power cuts/surges are so rare, at least here in the first world, that the cost of acquiring and maintaining a UPS (don't forget to replace the battery every so often!) is greater than the cost of having some backups and occasionally replacing a disk. In fact, my upgrade cycle for replacing disks because I've run out of space is far faster than the time between power supply problems, so if something does go wrong I'll just upgrade sooner.

UPSes matter more at work only because the downtime caused by an outage is more costly.

Re: Vitally important question

Re: Pop goes Samsung's glossy image.

Once Apple have my money, they appear to want to give me excellent service even though it costs them. Why? Because giving me excellent service makes me more likely to buy more stuff from them. But then, Apple compete on quality, Dell and Samsung on price. I'd argue, however, that when you take into account how much extra you'd have to pay a third party to get Apple-level service on a Samsung or Dell product, Apple are price-competitive anyway.

The Unicode consortium's permitted combinations of character sets are a bit odd. Their "highly restrictive" level will ban identifiers that mix Latin and Arabic or Latin and Hebrew or ... well, you get my drift, while explicitly permitting Latin and far eastern scripts. That's just weird. It's fairly common to see text in random scripts with Latin numerals embedded in them.

And in the "moderately restrictive" level they single out the combinations of Latin + Cyrillic and Latin + Greek, which would ban things like Αθήνα2004 or Со́чи2014.

I know why they're doing it, but they're still going to end up hitting an awful lot of legitimate addresses and domains with this.

They are obviously optimising (or satisfacting) something other than money. Perhaps they're putting a value on the time they spend not sitting in their taxi. I know that I sure as hell put value on the time I don't spend at work. If I were to merely optimise for money I would be on a much higher salary but would have a lot less free time.

Re: On Street Parking

Re: On Street Parking

A 250 mile range doesn't help if you need to drive further than that, like I will be next weekend. Sure, you'll be able to recharge en route, but recharging is very VERY slow compared to just pumping some squashed dinosaurs from one tank to another. You will need a ridiculous number of charging points at service stations - including those on the back roads, not just motorway service stations where they have the parking space - if you are to avoid humungous queues.

You either need some way of getting 1.5GJ (about the amount of energy in a typical car's full fuel tank) of energy into a battery in a couple of minutes (so an 8-ish MW power supply) or you need some way of swapping batteries automatically. Both are, umm, "challenging" problems. The current Tesla S, according to Tesla's marketing materials (so take this with a pinch of salt) will take *three and a half hours* to recharge with 250 miles worth of energy using their studliest charger. This is why electric cars are only suitable for commuting - journeys you can do on a single charge, with a long break to recharge at both ends. Trouble is, in cities you don't want people commuting in cars at all, because of congestion - you want them commuting by train or bus instead.

Re: Monopoly

There's no satnav system available that can cope with temporary road closures. A cabbie who keeps up to date with TfL's published closures and who knows all the roads intimately can just route around the problems.

Also, a "London Satnav" would be just another way of increasing the cost - just like the special London taxis are.

Re: Allowable overtime means they can creep up to almost 40 hours?

> Trade Unions really are shitty for workers, aren't they?

No, only when you permit them to do stupid things on your behalf - or you have a stupid government or employer.

I've been in a union for over 20 years now. Not once have I permitted them to negotiate anything on my behalf, because I know that I can do better. So what do I get for my membership dues? Knowledge of what my rights are and a great insurance policy that will provide highly-trained attack lawyers if I ever have a massive falling out with an employer. And like with all insurance policies, I hope that I'm just pissing my money away and that I never have to use those lawyers.

Re: David Cantrell

There's a simple way of telling whether Eich's opposition to gay rights is acceptable or not and whether he is a fit person to run an organisation. Just consider whether his behaviour would be acceptable if applied to some other minority group. Black people, for example, or Jews. Only if it's reasonable to deny marriage rights to black people is it reasonable to deny marriage rights to gay people.

If Eich were to have been suddenly outed as donating money to the cause of outlawing black marriage, Mozilla would turf him out tout de suite.

It was decimal currency that really destroyed mental arithmetic, you know. In real life you rarely have to convert between inches, feet, yards and so on - I'm 6'3", not [thinks] 75". But you very much had to convert between L, s, and d all the time.

Re: Talk about a solution looking for a problem

It might hold the phone to a vertical surface under normal circumstances, but if the phone is to be easily removed from the charging point I doubt it would hold it under the sort of extreme acceleration you get in an accident, whereas a properly mounted cradle will.

Having hard things flying around the cabin like missiles is Bad. I'd rather suffer the very minor inconvenience of having to pay a moment's attention when placing my phone in the cradle than run the risk of having the phone smack me or my passenger in the temple or eye when someone drives into the side of my car.

Re: Inevitable

This shall not be allowed? Really? I use a "loan-based crowdfunding site" (fundingcircle.com), and a large proportion of the loans made through it are partially funded by ... the government, as part of some programme for supporting small business. Yes, clearly it shall not be allowed.

Re: History says otherwise

I bought a shiny new iPhone on Saturday, to replace my shiny old iPhone. There are two main reasons that I went with Apple and not Android.

First, my existing apps would continue to work. Second, continued availability of new apps.

Given that both of those apply, there's no reason for me to go Android. However, if the second stops applying, then Apple will eventually lose me as a customer. Palm lost me for the same reason - Palm arsed around for years and lost all their third-party developers, so users got no new apps or services and no updates to existing apps. Users then jumped ship and by the time the Pre came out it was too late - all their customers now had iPhones, Windows Mobile (or whatever it was called that week) or Blackberries.

Re: Totally agree about WTFapp

Don't build the infrastructure! For a long time you could make pots of cash by just running a switch and flogging number translation services for businesses that thought they needed an 0845 number. These days, run an MVNO.

Re: Guess I'll be the bad guy

A business can say that they can refuse to serve you for any reason they like, just like they can put anything they like in a contract. But statute always trumps that so that, in civilised countries, businesses can *not* in fact refuse to serve people just because they're gay, just like they can't put clauses in contracts saying "and you can't sue us for any reason ever".

Re: Goto

Re: Goto

And also ... use 'else if' for long chains of independent conditions. Not only does it make the code clearer by making their independence obvious, but it would also have turned this particular error into a syntax error and compilation failure.

Easy. There are examples out there. Which means that creating a test case is also easy. Time-consuming, perhaps, but easy. All the certificate tests would be time-consuming but easy, and I *really* hope that they've got at least some - and that means that they know how to create them, so creating more shouldn't be such an awful task.

Re: Funny thing is

If you pick the right cellco then international roaming is so cheap as to be not worth worrying about anyway. On O2 a week of using just as much data and making just as many calls abroad as I do normally costs only about 15 quid. Sure, I'd love to get it for free instead, but there are costs arising from them buying bandwidth from the foreign cellco. If they can't recover those costs - and make some profit - from the person responsible for those costs, then they'll just have to put everyone's bills up instead.

It's been my policy for something like a decade that I'm happy to support peoples' PCs, provided that they are bought from Apple and run a recent version of OS X. I'll support as far back as 10.6. OS X on Apple hardware "just works", without having to worry about hardware compatibility or arsing about with obscure configuration parameters, which is good from the support point of view. And all the applications that a normal person would want are available, which is good from a user's point of view.

No, I don't give a toss about video games on a PC. The iPhone and iPad are much better gaming platforms, and if you must have FIFA Call of Grand Theft Halo LVII then get a Playstation 360 or whatever it's called this week.

I loved the 464 that my parents got me for Christmas 1984. By then I was already enthusing about programming, on the BBCs we had at school, but those were unaffordable, especially considering that they'd also have to buy a cassette player and a screen for it as we didn't have a TV. The CPC, with tape deck and monitor included, was cheaper than the Acorn machine alone, and that alone makes it a better machine.

I was still using it up to 1992 when I used Protext on it to write up my A-level physics project, and to crunch the numbers for my A-level stats project.

In between, I must have spent most of my waking hours hacking on it. It made me the highly-paid IT pro that I am today. Thanks, Alan, Roland, Richard et al!

"Imagine Harvest Moon set to Doom’s 'Nightmare' difficulty setting and you have Don’t Starve"? I'd love to, but I have no idea what "Harvest Moon" is. I assume it's a video game, but other than that - nothing.

They might *currently* be used by the people who developed them, but that sort of thinking leads to massive problems down the line when those people leave or move elsewhere in the company. What's more it will lead to communication problems with people outside their group. And they *will* need to communicate outside their group.

See also the stupid Debian naming scheme and the stupid OS X naming scheme. In both cases unless you just memorise a list of idiotic names you have no idea whether wheezy was one or three versions before etch, or whether Leopard preceded or followed Lion. This makes life harder than necessary for those who have to only occasionally know what's going on. Such as users asking for support.